Twenty-four years ago, on 19 January 1984, I was living in
Katherine in Australias Northern Territory in the middle of the
oppressive heat of that regions summer. I had just received a copy
of my maternal grandfathers autobiography from a cousin in Canada.
This autobiography was not the record of his entire life, just the
part from his birth in England in 1872 to his marriage in 1901 in
Hamilton Canada. I had browsed through but not read this
one-hundred thousand word 400 page double-spaced narrative written
about 1921-1923, by an autodidact, a self-educated man, when he
was fifty years of age. As my grandfather indicated in 1953 when he
wrote a brief preface to that work while living in Burlington
Ontario five years before his death, it was his hope that his story
would arouse interest. As I write this preface to the sixth
edition of my autobiography or, more properly, this epic literary
work, on 9 September 2007, it is my hope that this work will also
arouse interest..
It has been nearly ten years since I finished the first edition of
Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Since that time I have added a large
body of my poetry among other additions, deletions and alterations.
The poetry of history is rooted in the geography, the landscape, of
each poet and the facts of the period of history in which the poets
wrote. This is also true of my work. The addition of my poetry to
this work seemed a natural process. It also helped to give a new
lease on life to the writing of my autobiography which by 1993 was
wilting, its vitality and the energy and enthusiasm I began with
dissipated. As the American poet John Ashbery once said: the poem
is you. Much of me, as Ashbery might have said, is added to this
2nd edition. 